Senior AWS Architect - Cloud Migration & Pre-Sales Lead in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This is a senior-level, high-visibility contractor role suited for experienced cloud architects looking to work on complex enterprise migration projects. The 25% pre-sales component is notable — it means you'll be developing business development and client-facing skills alongside deep technical work, which is relatively rare and valuable for career growth.
Compensation context: The role is USD contractor-based with no stated rate. Senior AWS Solutions Architects in the US typically command $150–220/hr as contractors, or $180K–$250K annually. Expect the rate to reflect the high seniority and AWS MAP specialization required.
Skills you'll build and deepen:
- AWS MAP program delivery — a niche, in-demand certification path that opens doors with AWS partners
- Executive stakeholder management and pre-sales solution design
- Multi-cloud migration (VMware, Azure, GCP to AWS)
- AI/ML-adjacent modernization tooling (AWS Transform)
- Technical leadership across distributed, cross-cultural teams
Green flags: Direct collaboration with AWS account teams boosts your professional network significantly. The scope — 2–3 parallel engagements, executive-level client exposure — accelerates career growth fast.
Watch for: The contractor structure means no stated benefits, PTO, or job security. Managing 2–3 simultaneous engagements plus pre-sales is a high workload. Confirm engagement cadence and support structures before signing. The role suits someone aiming for a Principal Architect or Cloud Practice Lead trajectory.
As a Senior AWS Cloud Solutions Architect, you will be the technical lead on our most complex engagements, from assessment and mobilization to large-scale migration and modernization. You will report to an Engineering Manager based in Europe and lead distributed teams of US- and Budapest-based engineers. You will also work closely with colleagues in our AI/ML and Application Development practices.
What you'll be doing:
- Lead the technical delivery of complex, high-impact migration and modernization engagements, including AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) assessments and mobilization.
- Lead technical discovery and design multi-service, cloud-native AWS architectures that turn business goals into scalable blueprints.
- Technically lead teams of 1–4 engineers, and manage the technical roadmap of 2–3 engagements in parallel.
- Own technical design decisions within project scope. Resolve technical disagreements and handle scope conversations with clients professionally.
- Represent Client in customer sessions, including executive-level conversations and joint sessions with AWS stakeholders.
- Spend around 25% of your time on pre-sales: discovery, solution design and co-selling with AWS account teams in North America.
- Resolve high-risk technical blockers and escalations, including critical production incidents.
- Adapt to changing delivery expectations and keep engagements on track under uncertainty.
- Build architectural guardrails, reusable frameworks and components that raise quality across the practice.
- Coach engineers and share knowledge through internal sessions, workshops, whitepapers and technical evangelism.
- Be the go-to expert in one or more domains, such as MSSQL Server, PostgreSQL, EKS, VMware, data, security or networking.
- Help shape our technical offerings and accelerators in line with market and AWS trends.
What you bring:
- 8+ years in infrastructure or cloud engineering, including 5+ years designing and delivering on AWS.
- A proven track record of leading at least two large-scale cloud migrations end to end.
- Hands-on database migration experience with MSSQL Server, Oracle or PostgreSQL.
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional.
- In-depth knowledge of core AWS services, including:
- Compute and containers: EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS
- Storage and databases: S3, RDS, EFS, EBS
- Networking and integration: VPC, API Gateway, CloudFront, SNS, SQS
- Security: IAM, Security Hub, GuardDuty, KMS, AWS Private CA
- Operations and migration: CloudWatch, AWS Application Migration Service
- Strong Infrastructure as Code skills. Terraform is preferred; CloudFormation, AWS CDK or Ansible are also welcome.
- Hands-on experience building and running CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, GitLab, Bitbucket or similar.
- Experience running containerized workloads with Docker and Kubernetes or EKS.
- Strong networking knowledge: TCP/IP, DNS, load balancers, firewalls and VPN, plus AWS networking services such as VPC, Route 53, ELB and CloudFront.
- Strong security knowledge: IAM, least privilege, access control, endpoint security and data encryption.
- Excellent problem-solving and communication skills. You are confident with executives and engineering teams alike.
- Comfort working in a distributed team, with a few hours of daily overlap with Central European Time.
- A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, IT or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Nice to have:
- Hands-on experience with AWS MAP phases: Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate & Modernize.
- Migrations from VMware, on-premises data centers, Azure or GCP.
- Experience with AI-assisted migration and modernization tooling, such as AWS Transform.
- AWS Specialty certifications, such as Security or Advanced Networking.
Final Details
Remote
Contractor USD — Full Time (US time zone with a few hours of overlap with CET)
Start date: ASAP
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Frequently Asked Questions
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